The House approved a measure early Sunday morning that would fund the government through Dec. 15 while delaying implementation of Obamacare for one year, a politically risky maneuver that united House Republicans but pushes the federal government closer to a shutdown.

The legislation—which also includes an amendment to repeal the medical device tax and a separate provision to pay military members in the event of a shutdown—passed easily, putting the continuing resolution to keep the government running past Monday back in the Senate's court.

"They might have to come back from their vacation," said Rep. Tom Graves, R-Ga., who has led the charge for an Obamacare delay, before the vote. "Harry Reid has to now decide if he's going to continue forcing this bad law on the American people."

The Senate majority leader, though, has already dismissed the House's plan outright. The Senate, he announced Saturday, will reject the delay of the Affordable Care Act as well as amendment to cut the medical device tax, which Reid last week called "stupid."

"Today's vote by House Republicans is pointless," Reid said in a statement. "Republicans must decide whether to pass the Senate's clean CR, or force a Republican government shutdown."

To avoid a partial government shutdown, both chambers of Congress must reach an agreement by Tuesday, the start of the new fiscal year. The Senate adjourned on Friday until Monday afternoon, and senators are not expected to return early to respond to the House's latest proffer.

But according to a Senate aide and a House Democrat, Reid will move to table the House amendments to delay Obamacare and repeal the medical device tax. Reid also plans to shorten the time-frame for continued government funding under the bill and have the CR expire Nov. 15 rather than Dec. 15.

That means the Senate is poised to send back exactly the same language it sent to the House on Friday, according to the aide. And that would leave House Republicans in a position of accepting a so-called "clean CR" or forcing a government shutdown on Tuesday.

According to House Republicans, Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and his lieutenants already are considering how to devise an eleventh-hour response that could be acceptable to a majority of conservatives in his conference if the Senate does not budge.

One option, members said, is to revise the CR yet again—this time to include an amendment from Sen. David Vitter, R-La., that would prevent members of Congress and their staffers from receiving exemptions from key Obamacare measures.

Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., said he would support that strategy, because it would "make them live under this hellish law."

Other Republicans, however, were noncommittal on that approach. "It just depends on how many people are controlled by Ted Cruz," sniped Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., a moderate who has vocally opposed of the campaign against Obamacare mounted by the junior Republican senator from Texas.

For now, at least, House Republicans insist that their conference is unified—a claim supported by the votes taken early Sunday morning.

The floor action consisted of three separate votes. The House first voted 248 to 174 to repeal the tax on medical devices, with 17 Democrats joining 231 Republicans in support. The House then voted 231-192 to delay Obamcare's implementation by a year, with two defections from each party. A third vote was unanimous to continue appropriations for military pay in the event of a shutdown.

Hours before the votes, cheers erupted in a closed-door GOP meeting Saturday afternoon after Boehner made it clear the House was not giving up in the standoff with the Senate and the White House.

"Let's roll," an exuberant Rep. John Culberson, R-Tex., shouted as colleagues cheered Boehner. An unfortunate analogy, perhaps, because Culberson later explained he was evoking the battle cry of passengers who tried to wrest control of United Airlines Flight 93 from terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001. That was the fourth plane to go down in that day's terrorist attacks, crashing in a Pennsylvania field and killing all on board.

Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, went on the House floor shortly after the meeting and called Boehner "our great speaker."

Those in the room Saturday said there was uncertainty over what Boehner was going to say about the House's options, given the Senate's rejection of an earlier House CR containing language to defund the Affordable Care Act. That language was stripped out by Reid on Friday, providing a "clean" bill dealing only with government funding.

But, as lawmakers described it, Boehner walked up to the microphone and proceeded to matter-of-factly detail what his new strategy would entail.

"People went bonkers," with approval, said Rep. Matt Salmon, R-Ariz. "They were very excited."

And as the meeting adjourned, the accolades for Boehner kept on coming. Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas, a vocal critic of leadership who just two days ago trashed Boehner's proposed debt-ceiling maneuver, exited the meeting and flashed a big "thumbs up" sign.

Even Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, who often clashes with leadership and is known to regularly shun the media, ran toward a horde of reporters and declared: "It's a fabulous bill!"

Despite the enthusiasm, it's clear that given the warnings from the White House and Reid, Sunday's votes could bring the government one giant step closer to a shutdown. But House Republicans—including some who met privately this week with Cruz—said Saturday they were not worried that extending the battle with the Senate might send the nation spiraling into a shutdown.

"Republicans will probably be blamed for whatever happens," Franks said. "So, what remains for us is to do the right thing."

"Republicans will probably be blamed for whatever happens," Franks said. "So, what remains for us is to do the right thing."

In fact, some GOP lawmakers argued that by acting quickly, they were doing the Senate a favor.

"We're here for the weekend, we might as well work and get our job done—and give them plenty of time to get their job done," said Rep. John Fleming, R-La.

Added Rep. Steve Scalise, chairman of the Republican Study Committee: "We have a good plan ... and we're moving quickly. The Senate, if they're serious about not wanting a government shutdown, they ought to address this quickly."

The entirety of the House Republican Conference seemed supportive of the bill, and some members went as far as to predict unanimous GOP support for the proposal. (The only Republican defector on the bill the House sent to the Senate earlier this month was Rep. Scott Rigell of Virginia, who opposed the continued sequester cuts written into the bill.)

There is also optimism among Republicans that some Senate Democrats will rally to support certain provisions of the bill. Multiple GOP lawmakers specifically cited the support for delaying Obamacare coming from Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, and suggested that other red-state Democrats would be pressured to follow suit.

Lawmakers said that the GOP bill and its amendments will be structured in such a way that if the Senate strips out the Obamacare language, it would require the bill to come back to the House. "The speaker made that very clear," Salmon said. "If they change the bill in any way, it would have to come back to the House.

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Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

Here’s the idea: The person is told to focus on the troubling image or negative thought while simultaneously moving his or her eyes back and forth. To prompt this, the therapist might move his fingers from side to side, or he might use a tapping or waving of a wand. The patient is told to let her mind go blank and notice whatever sensations might come to mind. These steps are repeated throughout the session.